Breaking Free from the Toxic Power of Shame

It lies beneath the surface of our awareness, carefully hidden and ignored. We push it outside our awareness so we don’t have to deal with the pain it causes. In spite of our efforts to pretend it doesn’t exist, it is very much alive in the depths of our being, wielding its sinister, destructive power. Ironically, it is our efforts to deny it that gives it its power.

Once again, I am talking about the issue of shame.

Guilt and shame were the focus of last week’s blog (“Dealing with the Toxic Power of Shame,” September 24, 2023). In that blog, I dealt with the shame-based messages that create a shame-based identity at the core of our being: “You are no good—flawed—worthless. You’ll never amount to anything.” After identifying some of the ways we attempt to avoid this deep-seated message and the pain it causes, I ended the blog with a question: How does the message of Jesus address and resolve these shame-based messages and our shame-based identities?

Does the good news Jesus proclaimed have the power to set us free from our shame-based identities? Can it heal the emotional wound that we carry deep in our being? Can it set us free from the emotional pain with which we live? Can Jesus heal our shame?

The scriptures clearly address the issue of guilt.

Guilt is the emotional pain we experience whenever we fail to measure up to the demands of some societal, moral, or religious code. Guilt is about wrong behavior—what in church life is called sin.

Forgiveness is the way to resolve guilt.

Forgiveness is the way God deals with our failure to measure up, i.e., with our sin. It is a gift freely given. God forgives freely, unconditionally, lavishly, even joyfully. Before we ever recognize our sin—much less acknowledge it, confess it, or repent of it—God forgives our sin. God does not judge or condemn us. God forgives—period, end of story.

We have a difficult time dealing with the unconditional nature of God’s forgiveness. Because we naturally live out of merit-based, deserving-oriented thinking, we want to put conditions on God’s forgiveness. “God will forgive us if we confess our sins. God will forgive us when we repent.” In this way of thinking, God’s forgiveness is conditional. We have to do something before God will forgive us. In this way of thinking, forgiveness is no longer a gift. It is a bartered exchange.

How God relates to us is not determined by what we do—i.e., confess and repent of our sins. Rather, God relates to us out of God’s steadfast, faithful love. God relates to us out of grace—out of love that is unconditional. Forgiveness is the primary way God’s grace is expressed. I would go so far as to say God delights in forgiving. It reflects who God is at the core of God’s being. It expresses the heart of God.

Forgiveness—claimed and accepted—heals the pain of guilt. It sets us free from self-condemnation. It positions us to learn from our failure. It allows us to grow through our experience of sin.

While forgiveness is God’s cure for guilt, it—by itself—is not the cure for shame. It contributes to the healing of shame, but something more than forgiveness is needed to set us free from the toxic power of shame.

As I said in last week’s blog, shame stirs on a much deeper level than guilt. Guilt is about wrong behavior. Shame is about who we are at the core of our being. Thus, it operates and resides in the depths of our being. In our formative years, shame was used to condemn our wrong behavior. Those shaming experiences trained us to think of ourselves as no good—flawed—worthless—as someone who cannot measure up—as someone who will never amount to anything. Our experiences of shame inflicted a deep-seated emotional wound—a shame-based identity that governs how we live.

Because of the depth of this emotional wound, we need an experience of grace that pierces to the depths of our being. We need an experience of God’s love that will reshape our sense of who we are at the core of our being.

Forgiveness is a vital part of this healing.

Our wrong behavior often triggers our sense of shame. We use it as evidence that we are indeed no good—flawed—worthless—someone who cannot measure up—someone who will never amount to anything. We view our sin as validation of our shame-based identity. To escape this self-condemnation—which reinforces our shame-based sense of self—we must learn a different way of dealing with our failure to measure up. That different way is embracing God’s way of dealing with our sin. We claim God’s forgiveness.

Forgiveness heals our guilt and relieves its pain. In addition, it defangs our habit of self-condemnation. It breaks the cycle of using our failures to reinforce our shame-based identity. It opens the door to developing a new, different identity—one rooted in God’s unconditional love.

When we experience forgiveness, we experience God’s unconditional love. We are exposed to a different way of thinking and relating—God’s way of unconditional love and grace. Our experience of forgiveness plants the seed that we are loved—deeply, unconditionally, just as we are, with all our weaknesses, failures, and sins. The Spirit nurtures that understanding, helping it take root and grow in our deep mind. (Experiencing forgiveness and/or unconditional love from another person translates the concept of unconditional love into personal experience, making it more believable.) Over time, the seed bears fruit. The Spirit leads us to a new, Spirit-shaped identity as a beloved child of God (Romans 8:14-16, Galatians 4:4-7, Ephesians 1:3-5, 1 John 3:1-3). A beloved child of God—claimed by God’s grace in Christ Jesus—is who the Spirit says we are. That’s who we are.

As with forgiveness, we have to claim this spiritual truth, embracing it as a reality in our lives. As we learn to live out of this reality, the toxic power of the shame-based identity is broken. The emotional wound begins to heal. We move beyond how the world trained us to think about ourselves (Romans 12:2). We claim our identity in Christ Jesus—a beloved child of God.

God’s forgiveness is the cure for our guilt. God’s unconditional love is the cure for our shame.